White Light, Gene Clark

In my advancing years, I embrace my obsessions, often bred from bios or biopics. Shakey led to hours of Neil Young bin digging, and listening to On the Beach in the black hours of the evening kept the shadows on the walls, in a high, lonesome kind of way. The TVZ documentary, Be Here to Love Me, sent me tumbling into that Houston/Nashville nexus for almost two years, fiendishly checking ebay for record deals and mildly disappointed when Fat Possum came through, ending the search, and, like Soulseek, making it all too easy. The last year and a half it's been Gene Clark, and because he's the latest, he sounds like the answer to all our secular prayers. Well, he's clearly the best singer of the three, but you could clear taverns arguing over which one is the greatest songwriter. Clark, though, is the most relentlessly directed to a particular sound and tone, with a few notable exceptions. Neil Young is obviously famous for many reasons, but one is his willingness to change styles. No genre is safe while the man breathes. Townes, known mostly as the bearer of very bad tidings, is fucking hilarious when he wants to be. He'll do tongue-in-cheek and he'll do slapstick, even tell stupid jokes between songs. He'll do blues, country and western, and even those folk fellas are generally in his sights. Gene Clark is dead serious, man, and that is not an attack point. He wrote the best Byrds songs when they were IT, and his move toward country with Doug Dillard preceded Gram Parsons' more celebrated embrace of the genre that Hollywood could not initially abide. In the early 1970s, he hit, in my most humblest of opinions, his finest stride, producing one of the great three record strings in rock history with White Light, Roadmaster and No Other. His voice on these records is almost alien in its emotional impact. I cannot think of another singer who can hit listeners' sweet spots as precisely as this man, and coupled with the care and craft of the writing, the damn three-minute pop songs (with the exception of No Other, where he stretches things out and thickens the production) pack a wallop that transcends just about anything I've ever heard. There is an indefinable depth to the man's work that resonates on the deepest emotional levels, which I know sounds shrill but tell that to the stains on my couch. I've been married a long time, but I bet if I heard "Why Not Your Baby" during a vulnerable period in my single days, I'd have simply exploded, reducing the world's subsequent pain ever so slightly. I'd recommend the biography from Jon Einarson if you're a fan, as it delivers on the details even when it lacks the soul of something like Shakey. More importantly, if you haven't heard the man beyond the Byrds, get on it. Everyone needs a new late-night companion in terror.